I’ve never met author Matt Fitzgerald but somehow feel as if I know him. Sure we’ve exchanged the odd e-mail or two over the years but as a long-time triathlete fascinated by the sport, I’ve read most of what he’s written. Plus, I’m not at all bashful about contacting the author if something I’ve seen if it piques my curiosity. Fitzgerald is in that group, and he unfailingly responds to all of my goofy questions. I'm particularly a fan of The Endurance Diet, whichcontinues in the vein set by his well-written Racing Weight and its accompanying cookbook—both of which I consult often.

As triathletes we are always looking for an edge. Like Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast, we yearn to be "lean but comfortable"—and hopefully competitive, to boot. The question usually falls to how we can accomplish this with what's on our plate.

As Fitzgerald penned in his book Diet Cults, there seems to be a new "One True Way to eat for maximum physical health" coming out every week. The list of the miracle diets proven and then quickly usurped is endless—from Juice Fasting, to Blood Type, to Alkaline, to Ketogenic.

Here's where Fitzgerald departs from past thinking using observation of elite athletes worldwide. From this he constructs the "Endurance Diet" for the average Joe or Jill age grouper.

"People generally think that getting nutrition right is complicated, technical and difficult to achieve," writes Asker Jeukendrup, director of the lauded website mysportscience.com. "There is an overload of information and often contradicting advice." Fitzgerald is able, in not so many words, to spell out an easy to understand (and follow) plan that the reader can be confident will lead to the results they're seeking.

Fitzgerald began his project by interviewing world-class athletes from over 30 countries in 11 different sports. He then used scientific studies together with his keen sense of good versus bad science to distill five key principles. These form the core of the The Endurance Diet; he says that if you follow them, you’ll have the best chance to realize your athletic potential. He openly states that The Endurance Diet is for those who intend to maximize performance. However, if your primary goal is weight loss, look elsewhere.

The five core habits as he labels them are:

1. Eat everything

2. Eat quality

3. Eat carb centered

4. Eat enough

5. Eat individually

The Endurance Diet takes about 20 pages to meticulously document and explain, on the most basic level, each of these habits. In fact, it’s almost half the book. Fitzgerald approaches this carefully, almost tediously, as he wants you see his reasoning, understand it, and buy into the approach.

Further, he wants you to see that, as opposed to the now defunct trendy diet plans exposed in Diet Cults where he wrote "the recruiting efforts of [most] modern healthy diet cults consist almost entirely of efforts to convince prospective followers that their diet is the One True Way to eat."

Eat everything.

This command means exactly what it states—just not everything in sight. Unlike some of the current fad diets, not only are there no categorical food restrictions. Everything in the vegetable and fruit class is allowed, as well as nuts, seeds, healthy oils, unprocessed meat and seafood, whole grains, and dairy products.

Eat quality.

The foundation of an athlete's diet should be high-quality foods. This leaves little room for low quality (high sugar products, refined grains, etc.), which get the thumbs-down. In the Triathlete’s Training Bible, Joe Friel points out that "the quality of what you eat is critical for recovery." Fortunately for those of us who enjoy things like Oreos, beer, fries, and M&Ms, Fitzgerald writes that diets which "forbid entire food groups breed unhappy eaters."

Together with his first directive, Fitzgerald urges us to, rather than eating a whole sleeve of chocolate chip cookies watching American Idol reruns, take two and put the box away.

Eat carb-centered.

This requirement, together with eat enough, were the toughest for me to agree with. There’s so much out there virtually shouting the opposite. Fitzgerald himself quotes a 2014 Gallup survey where he notes that 29 percent of Americans try to avoid eating carbohydrates, reflecting a "negative public attitude towards carbs that has been trending steadily upwards."

Athletes who maintain the low carb pathway do so not for better performance but for weight loss and supposedly better health. The problem is that "carbohydrates per se do not, in fact, cause weight gain." He then lays out his case that it’s the refined grains and sweets, high in carbs, that are fattening, not the carbs in fruits and whole grains.

Eat enough.

A pro triathlete once wrote, "I always leave one bite of food on my plate." It’s a habit that I frequently carry out with this woman in the back of my mind. Fitzgerald discusses portion distortion as the "mismatch between the meal sizes that are sufficient for our energy needs and those we habitually choose," while recalling early childhood instructions from parents to "clean our plates." Yet it’s important to be able to put our forks down when comfortably full. This is true regardless of how much food is left on the plate.

Here, Fitzgerald addresses the unique pressures female athletes face: "Quite apart from recognizing the performance advantages of being lean, [they] are steeped in popular expectations to look skinny for the sake of being considered attractive," he says. On the other hand, one elite athlete on whom The Endurance Diet is based says the following: "I trust my appetite more than I trust my eyes." She eats without "any preconceived idea about how much she should eat."

As Fitzgerald summarizes: "eat enough food to fuel maximum performance but not so much that excess body fat accumulates."

Eat individually. Each athlete is encouraged to follow his or her own sense of taste, tradition, or culture and what’s available in one’s own climate. A nod is given to the vegetarian athlete, and he notes that we are all different in our dietary desires.

Overall, Fitzgerald puts into plain terms the food choices that endurance athletes should follow and why. He makes a believer out of the reader that the underlying core principles are not some fad or recent discovery, but ones gleaned from looking at elites around the world, and what they have discovered through trial and error. If you need them, there’s a chapter of recipes.

One part of the book I didn't find particularly helpful was Fitzgerald's diet quality score—a rating he developed that's supposed to quantify one’s diet quality using point values. For my money, I don’t think many will use it. He also presents 22 "endurance superfoods," most of which many of us probably already consume as part of a varied diet, rather than to make us able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

The book reminded me that with just a little education and motivation, we can improve the fuel that feeds our internal furnace. When that furnace is most efficient, each of us has the opportunity to race at our best. This is a confident sentiment as you wait on the beach or tread water, surrounded by two thousand others, waiting for the start gun to go off.

John Post is a six-time IRONMAN World Championship finisher and an IRONMAN Certified Coach.